xvii, 541 pages : 24 cm

Here is the revised and expanded edition of Daniel S. Burt's assessment of the 100 most influential novelists, playwrights, and poets of all times and cultures--now with 25 additional entries and some reassessments as well as 25 new black-and-white photographs and illustrations. All of the writers selected have helped to redefine literature, establishing a standard with which succeeding generations of writers and readers have had to contend. The ranking attempts to discern, from the broadest possible perspective, what makes a literary artist great and how that greatness can be measured and compared. Each profile distills the essence of the writer's career and character to help prompt consideration of literary merit and relationships by the reader

Includes bibliographical references (pages 497-512) and index

William Shakespeare -- Dante Alighieri -- Homer -- Leo Tolstoy -- Geoffrey Chaucer -- Charles Dickens -- James Joyce -- John Milton -- Virgil -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -- Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra -- Murasaki Shikibu -- Sophocles -- Feodor Dostoevsky -- William Faulkner -- Marcel Proust -- William Butler Yeats -- Alexander Pushkin -- T.S. Eliot -- Jan Austen -- George Eliot -- Euripides -- William Wordsworth -- Herman Melville -- John Keats -- Ovid -- Aeschylus -- Du Fu -- William Blake -- Gustave Flaubert -- Franz Kafka -- Moliere -- John Donne -- Aristophanes -- Thomas Mann -- Henrik Ibsen -- Anton Chekhov -- Henry James -- Walt Whitman -- Honore de Balzac -- Jonathan Swift -- Stendahl -- Thomas Hardy -- George Bernard Shaw -- Mark Twain -- Charles Baudelaire -- Samuel Beckett -- Virginia Woolf -- Alexander Pope -- Francois Rabelais -- Francesco Petrarch -- Emily Dickinson -- Edgar Allan Poe -- Henry Fielding -- Joseph Conrad -- August Strindberg

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